


Here's to You Mrs Hamilton

by foolishgames



Category: Black Sails
Genre: Billy's lovely arms, F/M, Flint the longsuffering, Miranda being awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-26
Updated: 2017-06-26
Packaged: 2018-11-19 06:56:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11308095
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foolishgames/pseuds/foolishgames
Summary: Captain Flint sends his most dependable crewman to guard his most precious asset. Miranda loves to make a sailor blush. Billy is pretty sure he's going to die.





	Here's to You Mrs Hamilton

**Author's Note:**

> I have turned out to have a lot of feelings about this show, and an awful lot of them are about Tom Hopper's, uh, physique.  
> Takes place in some alternate universe where they never go to Charlestown, and sort out the stuff with the gold by talking like grownups, or something.

Mrs Barlow looks alarmed to see him, fingers going white on the door frame. “Billy, isn’t it?” she says. “Is everything-?”

“Captain Flint’s caught up on some business in town,” he assures her. “He sent a letter.” The note had been hastily scribbled on the back of one of Miss Guthrie’s bills of lading; a flimsy pretext to send the most intimidating member of the crew to guard the captain’s weakest point.

Mrs Barlow takes the note from him. “You’d better come in, then,” she says. “Are you hungry?”

“I don’t need anything, ma’am.”

She gives him a sharp sort of look. “That isn’t what I asked. You expect to stay the night and not eat at all?”

“Who says I’m staying the night?” She hasn’t even opened the letter yet.

“James is perfectly capable of sending one of the lads from town to deliver a note. He’s done it before. He sent you here to watch me. Sit down there, I’ll get some bread and things together.”

“There’s not really any danger,” Billy assures her, sitting as instructed at the table. “But with the amount of gold sitting in the harbour, better safe than sorry. There’s too many rumours about you for someone not to have a bright idea.”

Mrs Barlow leans tiredly against the bench. “He found it, then?”

“Never seen so much gold in my life,” says Billy. “But the situation in town’s a bit precarious, so they’re sorting it out now.”

“Why am I not surprised it got complicated,” says Mrs Barlow. She brings over a tray of little crumbly biscuits and tiny plums, with a mug of cold well-water, and pats him on the shoulder. “Have a drink and cool off after your ride. I’ll be in the garden if you need me.”

“Stay in sight of the house,” says Billy, and immediately blushes. “I mean. Captain Flint will kill me if something happens to you.”

To his surprise, Mrs Barlow smiles, a little teasing. “I promise  _ most  _ faithfully,” she says. “You can keep your eyes on me at all times.”

She takes up a delicate lacy cap and a large wicker basket, and leaves Billy at the table slowly going hot all over.

He joins her in the garden after he’s eaten, and she sets him to hauling water from the well and digging over a new patch she’s staked out: pumpkins, she tells him thoughtfully, pumpkins or perhaps beans. The tools are good solid craftsmanship, and Billy puts his back into the simple work and tries very hard not to notice that she pauses in her weeding more often than is necessary to watch his shoulders under the sun.

Mrs Barlow makes salted meat into a kind of stew for supper, with bread fresh that morning and wine one of her neighbours makes, fruity and sweet.

“Tell me how you became a pirate,” she says, walking with her taper to the sconce on the wall, the little cluster of candles on the table, atop the harpsichord.

“I was press-ganged,” says Billy, “and then Captain Flint took the ship I was on and offered to take any man willing on for a fair share of profits. Seemed a good deal.”

“Did you learn to read in the Navy?”

He swallows. “My parents taught me. They were printers. They said that knowing letters would give me opportunities in life.”

She sits down opposite him again, smiling. “Opportunities not afforded such a strapping lad as yourself, I suppose.”

“Anyone can do lifting,” says Billy. “That’s all the Navy wanted from me, strong arms and such. Mr Gates had me doing the accounts for the ship, and writing letters and things.”

“Do you like to read?” she asks. “For pleasure, I mean. Do you read novels?”

_ A Puritan woman who shares my love of books _ , says Captain Flint in the back of Billy’s head, and he tries to concentrate on that instead of  _ pleasure  _ in her knowing, arch voice. “I don’t get much chance,” he says. “Anytime we take a prize with books on it, some bastard squirrels them all away for his woman.”

Mrs Barlow laughs, her head tilting back, the long, clean line of her throat dipping down to her cleavage. “I’m very sorry for depriving you,” she says. “Come, you can borrow any of them you like, will that be alright? A comedy, a tragedy, something moral?”

They sit on the floor by the bookshelf and Billy breathes in the scent of paper and ink, of dyed leather, and the glue used for binding. She reads him bits of Milton and Chaucer, laughs at his attempts to pronounce Greek, snatches one volume from his hand before he can glimpse the title - “Rubbishy moralising nonsense,” she says - and puts her hand on his forearm as he’s reading a snippet from Shakespeare, one of the funny ones.

“Billy,” she says, “will you come to bed with me? Oh, don’t look so alarmed.”

“I should let you rest, ma’am,” he says, all but scuttling across the floor away from her.

“Is it James that concerns you? Of course it is, forgive me.” His retreat is stayed by her hand in his, her calm gentle smile. “You needn’t worry. I promise you, your Captain Flint will not object at all.” She draws his hand in close until it rests high up on her waist. She’s not wearing any stays, so his thumb is brushing against the lower curve of her breast.

“I really ought to,” he mumbles. Her breaths are coming deeper and faster, pressing against her bodice, and her mouth is pink and soft by candelight, and Captain Flint is definitely going to have Billy hung.

“Well, don’t let me stop you,” she says, the curve of her mouth wicked and pleased. “Go on, then, off to bed,” and she crawls into his lap and kisses him.

Billy groans a curse into her mouth. He could remove her, he knows, he could do it without hurting her; she’s a slight thing and her hand on his neck is languorous. But she smells of aging paper and damp earth and candlewax, and she’s bold and straightforward in what she wants from him, so he makes fists in the billows of her skirts and lets her settle her thighs on either side of him.

“What a lovely thing you are,” she murmurs. “Come on, then.”

She moves as if she’s going to climb off him, and Billy catches her by the waist and crushes her to him, using the bookshelf to pull himself to his feet with her still in his arms.

“Oh, lord,” says Mrs Barlow. “I was right about you.” The colour is high in her cheeks, and she curls her fingers in the loose collar of his shirt and kisses him again as he he moves them towards to hallway, where he supposes the bedroom is.

They don’t make it there. He fucks her up against wall of the kitchen with his trousers unlaced and her skirts shoved up. Her feet never touch the ground; her holds her up with the bare easy strength of his arms, and she hangs onto his shoulders and shudders around him.

Later, after she’s put most of the candles out and banked the kitchen fire, she makes him undress for her, takes her hair down and rides him in the soft bed so she can watch him while she does. His hands go nearly all the way around her waist and her hair is like fine Chinese silk, catching in the roughness of his calluses.

She reaches for him again when dawn is just beginning to pale the horizon, and he’s got his head between her thighs and a hand on his cock when the door opens and Captain Flint says “Jesus Christ, Miranda,” and shuts the door again.

“He’s not going to kill you,” says Miranda, while Billy wonders how far he’d get if he jumped out the window and just legged it. She pulls on a gown of some sort, which crosses over in front and makes her look properly modest, but her feet are bare and her hair is frankly wild, and Billy is definitely going to die.

Miranda only chuckles, and kisses the top of his head before wandering out into the kitchen. Billy makes a start on getting dressed, but his shirt is in the hallway, and fuck knows where his boots are.

He creeps out into the hallway, and he can hear movement in the kitchen; peaceful, homely sort of sounds, certainly nothing that might indicate an enraged cuckold.

“Why did it have to be my bosun, you wench?” That’s Captain Flint, and he sounds just regular Captain Flint-annoyed, not homicidal-annoyed.

“Isn’t that why you sent him?” Miranda’s voice is teasing. There’s a clink of crockery, and a log settling in the fire. “You always bring me nice things when you’re going to be apologising for something.”

“That isn’t license for you to seduce my crew out from under me,” he says. “Billy, stop skulking in the hallway. Come and eat.”

His boots are by the bookshelf. Billy dons them and sits down to bread and butter with ham, and tea with sugar, while Miranda is perfectly serene and Captain Flint appears to be trying very hard not smirk, and it’s so profoundly peculiar Billy feels as if it’s some sort of odd dream.

The Captain tells them about his meeting with Vane, and the repairs to the fort, and then does the washing up while Billy puts the bookshelf to rights - they’d left volumes all over the floor - and Miranda goes to get dressed properly.

“Pastor Lambrick’s coming up the road,” she announces when she emerges, putting the last pins into her hair. “He’s in a hurry, somebody must have told him I was entertaining.”

“You’re very entertaining, but I think I’ll miss it this time,” says Flint, and kisses her cheek before he strides for the door. “Come on, Billy.”

“Visit again soon,” says Miranda, the slow swoop of her eyes making her intentions known. “Oh, this -” she passes him  _ Much Ado About Nothing, _ and sends him off with a squeeze to his backside.

They’re a hundred yards or so down the road when Captain Flint can’t contain his laughter. “Christ, Bones. Don’t look so terrified.”

“Sorry, Captain. I thought you’d be, well. You know.”

“I’ve no claim on Miranda,” says Flint. “She isn’t my wife, Billy, and even when she was married she did as she pleased.”

“Right,” says Billy. “Yes.” it’s a pleasant morning, the horses are fresh and the ride is easy, and Billy is, apparently, not going to be killed for fucking the Captain’s woman.

They go a little further in silence, and then Captain Flint says, “I wasn’t much older than you when I started working with Miranda’s husband. A good man. She turned up at my room one day while I was half dressed to invite to some exhibition or other, just the two of us, said her husband wouldn’t mind and never mind the rumours.”

“Oh,” says Billy. London manners are a distant memory, but that sounds like a proposition. “Did you go?”

Flint snorts. “I put her back in the carriage and told her I was taking her home to her husband. Three streets later she had my trousers off and was telling me how much she loved a Navy man, the hair was so convenient a handle.” He tugs at the little tail of hair. “It was longer then, mind you.”

“Fucking hell,” says Billy, and then they’re both laughing, rather wildly, as if they’ve made some kind of lucky escape. “And the husband? He didn’t mind?”

The smile fades from Flint’s eyes, but there’s no threat of anger, just something regretful. “He and I felt the same way about many things,” he says. “Miranda’s happiness foremost.”

Billy backs off the subject delicately. “She asked me to visit again,” he says.

“Fine,” says Flint. “The men will say the witch has got you, snared you with her webs and beguiled you with her feminine charms.”

“Best not tell them the truth,” says Billy, “or they’ll all want a witch.”


End file.
